If you needed another reason for why remote working is a benefit, look no further than an article written by Raj Samani in computerweekly.com. In “Remote Working Is Not All or Nothing“, Samani points out that when there is a natural or unnatural occurrence which causes a traditional office to close, there is whole day of work lost. He used the example of a heavy snowfall.

If people are able to work remotely, then something like a heavy snowfall may not necessarily mean a day of lost productivity. Employees or contract workers are able to access email, reports, and other essential data from home if a remote working program for the company is in place. Even a planning meeting need not be put off if the company has access to a conference calling service. Fire up your cell phone, sweeties! You won’t be able to deek out of the meeting after all.

Of course, there remains the question of security. It’s all very well if people can access files remotely, but what if other people, non-authorized people, can too.

Samani suggests that small business owners who are looking at extending their company’s perimeter (just look at me using fancy tech jargon!) may want to consult web networking systems experts. Apparently, there are now computer companies that provide the technical know-how and support that every small business needs when taking those first precarious steps into the risky world of remote working.

So if you need another item to add to the ‘pro’ side of remote working, this is it: you can keep working even if the world has stopped around you. Or may be this is actually a ‘con’? Hmmmm.

Q: What kinds of security issues have you encountered in your remote working experience? How have you solved them?

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll save your seat until next time!

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One Response to “Another ‘Pro’ For Remote Working”

When accessing services of your business intranet remotely, the primary problem might be the “eavesdroppers”.

This means either someone who can pick the conversation between your laptop’s wireless card and the cafe’s Access Point off the air (and this can be done fairly easily today), or someone who can tap the communications, between your laptop and the computer it is connected at the workplace, on some point further down the line.(A bit more difficult but still possible)

In either solution, you create an encrypted link between the two communicating computers. The eavesdropper can still intercept your traffic but they would not make any sense out of it. On top of this you can use the so called “Certificates” to ensure that either end is indeed who it claims to be. (“The person connecting to my server right now is indeed my worker” and “The server i am connecting to right now is indeed the server of my company”)

The VPN requires a bit more work to be set-up but usually this is already available in businesses that require remote access for their workers. It is also less difficult to set it up at the client’s end (that is your laptop sitting at the cafe 😀 )

If VPN is not available and all you want to do is (for example) check your email securely, then you can set-up a secure tunnel with SSH. This might be a bit counter-intuitive to get, at first, because you will be setting up a connection to your local computer which is then forwarded (by SSH) to the other communicating computer. But once you get this concept, setting up tunnels towards any service will be easy.
(A short tutorial available from here:http://www.no-junkmail.com/Secure-Tunnel.html)…If your laptop is a linux machine then SSH is (most probably) built in and you can use it right away.

Apart from these actual dangers, remote users are always exposed to the common dangers of everyday browsing…like spoofing sites trying to get your credentials, scam emails, etc.
In this case, a good idea is to have a well written informative document (no more than 3-5 pages maximum, otherwise no one is going to read it ) to pass it to your workers letting them know what it is they are doing and what are the dangers they might be facing. This can be part of an overall security policy of the company

On the other hand, servers at the company’s end will also be exposed to a number of dangers and threats from the outside world. A well thought security policy can also help there.

(Damn! I should be rambling so extensively on my blog (albeit in Greek 🙂 ) not other people’s space :-D….Excellent blog by the way…been reading it since the “remote working survey” 😉 )